Izzy taps my back with the palm of her small hand. “I really want an ice cream cone. Should I get vanilla or chocolate?”
I remember the other beat: one long … two short, as if I am remembering my heartbeat.
Max
Saturday, 12:50 P.M.
Back on my shift in the Snack Shack. My last shift ever, and somehow I’m ten minutes early. I could have stayed with Claire and her sister, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say to a girl like her. Anyway, I don’t want or need any more excitement. I need boring. I need to float from here until the first day of school. I’m sure I can just ease through the rest of the afternoon, ease through—and go. I slide my feet across the floor in my effort to be effortless.
From the front counter, Trish calls, “Hero-boy, look at you.”
“Hero-boy!” echoes Peter.
The shore is packed with people dashing in and out of the water. No sign of currents that could drag anyone under. No sign at all that someone, that Claire, nearly drowned. But I’m not a hero. I don’t know what came over me going in the water after her. I am not the kind of guy who saves people. I’m the go-along-to-get-along type of guy. I’m the ultimate team player, the guy who can play a half dozen positions on the soccer team, and play them well enough. I’m the guy who doesn’t like to work too hard or think too much, who has had the easy life, according to my father, even if I did spend the summer working at the Snack Shack.
“How’d you hear?”
“Barkley told us,” says Peter. “But he sounded mad at it.”
“He always sounds mad,” says Trish with a big laugh. Squeezing by, she tosses a smile at me, and I even smile back, but just a bit. I don’t want her to get any ideas, even on my last shift ever. “I’m on a bathroom break,” she calls out, leaving me with Peter.
“Where’s Barkley?” I ask him. He’s working with the broom, sweeping with great energy but no results.
“Counting water bottles again,” says Peter. “Why does he always count the water bottles?”
I don’t know why anybody does anything. Dive in after a girl you hardly know, count water bottles when nobody asks you to count them. “Maybe we’re all just a little bit weird.”
“Yeah, maybe we are,” he agrees happily.
“Anybody working here?” says a middle-aged customer with a mass of hair everywhere but on the crown of his head. “I’d like a chocolate ice cream cone over here.”
“One ice cream cone?” Peter repeats, dropping the broom. I pick it up and put it away so we don’t trip and kill ourselves. “What kind of ice cream cone? We have chocolate, vanilla, or swirl?”
“Chocolate, I said.”
“Chocolate?”
“Chocolate!”
Peter trudges back toward the ice cream machine, muttering “chocolate” so he won’t forget.
“Cooper,” Jackson beckons to me from the front of the line. He leans across the counter, confidentially, as if he wants to consult with me, probably on something to do with the team. I’m going to have to assure him that I’ve been practicing those penalty kicks. I’m going to be cool with him today.
“Hey, man.”
“Still working here?”
“Last day.”
“Party this weekend?”
“You know it,” I say.
“Nobody’s going.”
“Yeah?” I say, as if I care, which, of course, part of me does.
Samantha eases up behind him. Today she is in a hot-pink bikini. Her hair hangs straight down her back. For the first time this summer, I think: this girl must never swim at the beach. I’ve never seen her hair wet, not like Claire’s—all wild and undone.
“Hey,” she says to no one. But what she does is this: wrap her arms around his stomach and reach up to scratch his chest with her long pink nails.
“Hey,” he says to her, twisting around, talking down to her head, and asking her, “You going to this loser’s party?”
She doesn’t even look at me, only at him, and shrugs. “He never asked me.”
She’s right. I never asked her. All the back-and-forth between us was in my mind. She’s like any other girl on the beach—sparkle and flirt and giggle and it’s hard, sometimes, not to look at her. She expects you to look and once you know that, you know it’s all about her. I can’t really think this through right now—with Jackson and her contorting, claiming each other with lunging kisses—and kids calling out for ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, swirl, and Peter, man, he’s not keeping any of it straight and there’s no sign of Barkley or Trish—I’ve got to admit it was never about me or us in her eyes.
He pushes her away and she giggles. “We’re not going, are we, Jackson?” she says to him, swinging around to face him, noticing, I guess, that his attention is not on her at that moment.
Peter shuffles back toward the counter. “Chocolate,” he says, pushing the ice cream cone toward the kid, who flings two dollars at him and runs off with the cone.
“How about taking my order?” says Jackson to Peter with a glint and edge.
“I’ll help you,” I say to Jackson.
“Isn’t he supposed to be helping me?” says Jackson, never breaking his smile. “I’ll have a vanilla cone.”
“Vanilla?” repeats Peter.
“I got it.”
“No, I think I’ll have chocolate.” He winks at Samantha, who giggles. She’s freed him, for the moment, from her pink nails.
“Chocolate?” repeats Peter slowly, looking over at me.
“I’m getting it,” I say, hurrying. I just want this shift to be over.
“I want the sped to help me,” says Jackson in such a friendly way you almost miss him insulting Peter, that he’s calling him what we all, sometimes, call the kids who are led by aides down the hall in high school, who are in the “closed door” classes, who are students in special education, or shorthand: “speds.” Peter may have one more year to go in high school, even be in regular classes like gym and health, but to people like Jackson he will always be a sped. While I may have called him the same name once or twice over the summer in anger and frustration, I don’t like it coming from Jackson on my last day of having to work with Peter.
“Is that you, Cooper? Are you the sped these days? You spent the summer hanging out with this guy, maybe he wore off on you? You going into the special classes with kids like him in the fall?” I don’t miss this. I stop in my tracks, clenching and unclenching my fists. This is worse than yesterday. I am so glad that today is my last shift in the history of Snack Shack shifts.
“You and I are at different schools,” says Peter, reasonably, to me. “Doesn’t he know that?”
“Hey, hey, what are you doing?” calls out Jackson. “I’ll have a swirl. You got that, Cooper?”
“Swirl,” repeats Peter to me, as if I need help.
Samantha giggles more.
“Maybe two. Should I really rock their worlds and order two?” he says to Samantha.
I don’t know how I liked her. How I was always waiting for her to come up to the counter—and she came nearly every day. When did she hook up with Jackson? How did I miss that?
“Two?” repeats Peter, struggling.
“I’m on top of it,” I say to him. “Take care of another customer.”
“Two cones?” Peter persists to Jackson. “Vanilla and chocolate, or swirl?”
“Sure. Or maybe just chocolate. Or chocolate and vanilla. Or swirl and chocolate.”
“Or vanilla and vanilla,” says Samantha as if she has just caught on to the pattern.
“Didn’t I say ‘swirl’?” Jackson spits out like he’s in a comedy routine.
“I’m helping them, Max,” says Peter. “I can do it.”
“I know you can do it, Peter. But let me take care of these guys, okay? You handle the bottled water line. You know how I hate selling the bottled water.”
This isn’t happening to me. Not on my last shift.
“It’s okay, the sped’s hel
ping us, isn’t he?” Jackson makes like he’s innocent, with this broad smile on his pinhead. Samantha smiles at him.
“Cut it, Jackson.”
“What am I doing, Cooper? I’m just ordering ice cream cones. You and him can’t handle that, it’s not my problem, is it?”
“I can do this, Max,” shouts Peter, something he does when he definitely can’t handle the situation.
Jackson leans across the counter toward Peter. “Chocolate. Vanilla. Swirl. What did I want? Tell me.”
Peter can only look in more confusion from Jackson to me. Before I can act or do anything with the cone in my hand, on the other side of the counter, Barkley comes up from behind Jackson. He’s twice as big as Jackson, bald, pale, and wearing those creepy sunglasses of his. He looks like an off-duty cop.
Jackson holds his hand up between himself and Barkley. “You know something, I don’t really want an ice cream cone, do you, Sammie?”
“Then let’s move along, okay?” says Barkley. “Because you’re not helping anyone being here. Not me. Not Peter. Not Max. Move along, you got it?”
“Okay, I’m going. But I will see you Wednesday, Cooper, first day of school.” Jackson leans back across the counter and without a trace of humor says to me, “Have fun at your party.”
“Move,” says Barkley, his voice modulated a notch or two above what’s needed for the situation, not quite a shout, but loud, almost mechanical or without feeling—weird again. “Especially the girl in the pink bikini. Move off the line. You, I know you. I know what you want.”
“He wishes he knew me,” says Samantha to Jackson.
Barkley leans toward her. “I know that you have been watching me. All the girls in pink have been.”
I’d feel better if there were some irony in that statement, but part of me believes that Barkley believes they’ve been spying on him. He’s dead serious.
“In your dreams,” says Samantha. She flutters her shiny pink nails down on Jackson’s hand. He’s not holding hands with her, though. At least, they’re not at that stage.
And why do I care?
“Hey, I can’t wait until school starts, Cooper,” says Jackson, right up into my face.
“I can’t wait, Jackson.” My neck and shoulders tighten, and I wish I were floating, not arguing, not thinking, not having to deal with Jackson or Peter or Barkley. In all this, Tricia is looking at me like she wants to tell me something, something funny, and I’m not sure what to do with her behind the Snack Shack counter. I really don’t want Samantha or Jackson seeing the fat girl liking me. Trish hands me a humongous swirl cone and rubs my back. I act like I’m in a hurry.
Samantha swivels away from Barkley. “He’s an a-hole,” Samantha says to Jackson so prettily I barely catch the insult. I don’t know whether she’s talking about Barkley or me. All at once, I wish she didn’t say it, I didn’t hear it, and that she means Barkley, not me.
I shove the cone toward Jackson, a lopsided swirl, dripping at its sides. I want to push it in his face.
“Hey, what the hell is this?” says Jackson.
“Swirl,” responds Peter.
“Take it,” I say. “On me.”
“What a mess,” Jackson says, shrugging and agreeing to the cone, lapping the ice cream up. He offers it to Samantha, who licks in the same place he licked. They step over the end of the counter with their free cone, and I think, some guys get it all: the game, the girl, the cone.
“Enjoy, sweetie,” shouts Trish at them.
“Hey, enjoy,” says Peter behind her, relieved, good-natured as always, though his innocence makes me sad.
The line breaks toward the counter in a wave. All of a sudden, Barkley, in a flat, loud voice says, “Form one line. Get on line. Do you know that only in New York do you get on line?”
A couple of the little kids push left and right. But Barkley freezes. He tilts his head as if listening to something that none of the rest of us can hear.
“You did good, Barkley,” says Trish to him. “Are you coming back on this side of the counter?”
“I know what it means,” he says to no one in particular.
“What it means?” I ask as I keep an eye on Peter serving up bottled water to one kid and a hot dog to the next. With Barkley on the other side of the counter, everyone on line is behaving for the moment. Maybe we should keep him there.
“What it means to be bullied.” He says this to me and Trish without emotion. I take an order for hot dogs and water. Make change. He continues, “And not having anyone side with you, having to listen to that voice in your head to discern what is right and what is wrong.”
I’m not sure why Barkley is always trying to prove he’s smarter than us. Maybe I can’t get beyond the shaved head, the body odor, and the mirrored sunglasses. Maybe I should be listening to the voice inside my head. Maybe he makes more sense than most.
However, his tragic flaw is that he keeps talking. “The voice inside us needs to be strong, or else evil wins. We cannot let the forces of evil and disorder win, can we?”
Part of me is thinking: Screw it. Let evil and disorder win. Vote for anarchy. I don’t even fully know what I mean by that, but it feels good to be angry.
Off to the side of the Snack Shack counter, Samantha bends toward Jackson. He smashes the melting end of the cone into his mouth. She swipes at the ice cream with the tip of her tongue, and, seeing me watching her, licks again, slowly. His arm drapes around her shoulder. He flings the cone toward our garbage can and misses. Their cold mouths kiss. Sea gulls attack their ice cream cone.
Beyond the two of them, holding her sister’s hand, is Claire, studying the scene, too—Samantha and Jackson kissing—and me, watching, and her watching. Somehow time or movement, the ordinary comings and goings of the sun or tide, contracts to this kiss. They are kissing and the sea gulls are scrambling on top of one another, a flurry of wings over the garbage, and I want to call out to Claire and say—say what? Come here? I’ll give you and Izzy a free ice cream cone? Come here, because I’ve got to admit that Samantha is the girl that I’ve been jerking off to all summer long and that she isn’t you, and I’m glad that you’re not her?
Instead, I’m hammered by the next customer. “Anybody working here?” he yells across the counter. “I need six ice cream cones before the end of summer.”
“Vanilla, chocolate, or swirl?” I say automatically. Claire’s long legs are cutting a path in the crowd, and Izzy’s dangling on to her fingertips. I hope she isn’t leaving the beach.
“Napkins? Do you have any napkins for me?” Samantha appears at the side of the counter. She directs this question at me, and I look at her dully. The tip of her tongue slices around her mouth. “I’m all sticky,” she says.
“Let’s go, Sammie,” shouts Jackson. “We don’t have time for these speds.” He raises his hand in a final salute, a middle finger aimed at us.
Next to me, Trish bursts out laughing, relieved, triumphant even, that Jackson is leaving, and of course Peter joins in. I follow, too. Sometimes you can’t do anything but go along, even though it will probably hurt me more with Jackson when school starts. But for right now, I laugh at being called a sped.
Barkley tucks his mirrored glasses into the pocket of his sweatshirt. He blinks rapidly, as if negating the crowd, the requests, the daily demands on each of us, and focuses on Jackson. Someone is asking me for a bottle of water, and, for the tenth time this shift, to make sure it’s cold.
“Bark, hey, you coming back to work?” I ask, because it’s clear that he’s not. He’s trailing Jackson. “We have a long line here.”
“Make sure it’s really cold,” says the next customer in front of me. Under her wide-brimmed hat, this customer’s face is too smooth, her lips too full, and her top up and tight as if someone gave orders for her to defy gravity at all costs. Most of all, she’s too old for her polka-dot bikini, and worse yet, she thinks she’s something I should be looking at.
“Real cold, honey,” trying to catch
my eyes and flirt. “It’s brutal out here.”
I monitor Barkley. He’s closing in on Jackson and Samantha. “Bark! We need your help.”
Instead, he takes off, bounding at Jackson. He bashes into him, throwing him to the sand, sprawling on top of him, pounding the back of his head. A mass of arms and legs rolls through the sand. The line splits apart. Attention is on the fight.
“What is going on?” My customer is annoyed. “I really need my water, don’t you see that?”
I race out of the Snack Shack. An old guy in a T-shirt that says “The beer stops here” tries to help and is knocked backward by Barkley wrestling Jackson. The old guy starts cursing about kids, but doesn’t make any further effort. Jackson screams.
“Who is a sped? Tell me?” Barkley shouts as he locks around Jackson’s suddenly fragile-looking neck.
I grab hold of Barkley’s hands. They are ice cold. It’s a hundred degrees out and his fingers are ice cold. Maybe he’s taken some of his own pills, and they’ve just kicked in. And if he’s done that, will it somehow get back to me that I have pills, too? Maybe the same ones? I don’t know if it’s Jackson, or Barkley, or me that I’m most concerned about.
Jackson yelps, red-faced.
“Don’t kill him, Barkley,” I say, losing my foothold in the sand.
Barkley bashes me in the chest with his elbow, once, twice, rocking the air out of me. I stagger—I didn’t think under all that flab was muscle—but I hang on. His hands screw around Jackson’s neck. I think: Barkley is going to kill Jackson on my last shift.
“It’s the heat! Don’t you see? It’s making us all crazy. This never-ending heat!” the lady in the polka-dot bikini squeals at us. Another corner is yelling, “Fight. Fight!” Samantha is shouting “Jackson!” as if that will save him. I feel dizzy and sick. Barkley elbows me again, swift and hard. I fall back. My mouth is open. Sand mashes in. I’m eating sand. I should let him kill Jackson.
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